Great Ideas – The Core Bloghttp://blogs.bu.edu/core
news, events, and commentary from the Arts & Sciences Core CurriculumMon, 23 Apr 2018 14:21:44 +0000en-UShourly1https://wordpress.org/?v=4.6.9From The Chronicle of Higher Education: Engineers Need the Liberal Arts, Toohttp://blogs.bu.edu/core/2017/05/28/from-the-chronicle-of-higher-education-engineers-need-the-liberal-arts-too/
http://blogs.bu.edu/core/2017/05/28/from-the-chronicle-of-higher-education-engineers-need-the-liberal-arts-too/#respondSun, 28 May 2017 19:21:44 +0000http://blogs.bu.edu/core/?p=5538STEM has its roots in the humanities. If our intellectual foundations are uprooted, then, naturally, the natural sciences and their applications are in danger of withering away. This is a strong reason for the protests that followedPresident Trump’s beginning attempts to deforest our education, which might have had in mindthe prospect of recreating America in his own image. The resistance included the engineers, who managed to circle his legs with enough rope to fell the giant before theswipe atthe National Endowment for the Humanities and the National Endowment for the Arts. For Kenneth Osgood, this was very good. But we shouldn’t be surprised that the engineers clanked themselves into alliance with the poets and painters, because as humans the humanities should be importantto them as well.

Adam Niklewicz for The Chronicle

Thats why, when hundreds of recruiters descend on my campus twice each year, I make a point of understanding their needs. I ask any I encounter the same thing: “What are you looking for from our graduates?” Without fail, I get a version of the same answer. Yes, they want technical skills. But they also want something broader. They want to hire engineers who can communicate and think critically, who can adapt and create, who can assess the quality of conflicting information, and who can view a problem from multiple perspectives. These are the core skills cultivated by the liberal arts, and Ive never met an employer who didnt think they were more important than most other people think.

We should therefore not be searching to winnow the humanities from the fields of study belonging to STEM but to integrate them into STEAM. Diversity and the diversification of labor are two trends that will not bear the fruits wewant them if there is no force to integrate whatever is being made more colorful.The fashion condones both without considering this qualification because it might resist the fashion, which always looks best when it comes in one-piece.The admission that the humanities need to serve a more integrated role in education would therefore require some integrity from administrators in a time when politics and educations are themselves becoming increasingly integrated.

]]>http://blogs.bu.edu/core/2017/05/28/from-the-chronicle-of-higher-education-engineers-need-the-liberal-arts-too/feed/0From TheTLS: In Praise of Narcissismhttp://blogs.bu.edu/core/2017/05/19/from-thetls-in-praise-of-narcissism/
http://blogs.bu.edu/core/2017/05/19/from-thetls-in-praise-of-narcissism/#respondSat, 20 May 2017 03:10:54 +0000http://blogs.bu.edu/core/?p=5526Shahidha Bari must be applauding her article for the TLS, ‘In Praise of Narcissism”, which attempts a reappraisal at the figure some of us have the pleasure of finding staring us in the mirror. Many wild theories have been proposed to explain these beautiful people, including ones that have expanded their definition of narcissism to include those for whom beauty is only in the eye of the beholder. But what’s wrong with being full of ourselves? For Bari, narcissism can be fruitful for philosophical introspection:

Illustration for the TLS.

These kinds of self-reflections are not always wasteful. We are accustomed to the idea of a contract-based culture of rights and responsibilities whereby we abide by laws andfulfillobligations, but we might also think about the ways in which civic society is predicated on ideas of self-cultivation, not far removed from narcissism. We can care for the self as the ancient Greeks once did. This is what Michel Foucault reflects on towards the end of his life, his body pitilessly ravaged by illness. This kind of self-care can take different forms writing, reading, eating, exercising but also training oneself to be a citizen, committed to a community in which all human beings are possessed of the same dignity we attribute to ourselves.

So Bari isnot talking about the self-aggrandized sense of narcissism that qualifies it for an entry in the DSM, but the moderated version, a little dosage of which is healthy for us all. In a sense, this neutered definition makes the article slightly disappointing, since not even the greatest bulwarksof altruism would deny that one must take the time toensure the wall is properly maintained and what not. In another sense, it it is a relief, because we know she voted for the right candidate.

We know from our readings of Augustine’s City of God that the saint believed in a world of souls stained by original sin. Over in Britain, however, fifth-century ascetic Pelagius denied that nagging evil lurking within souls, pointing instead to a world born to innocence that may be retained throughout a person’s lifetime. In other words, for Pelagius, we are born sinless, and we could live and die sinless if we have a mind to do so. As we can imagine, the two thinkers, Augustine and Pelagius, butted heads more often than not, leading to the latter’s excommunication from the Roman Catholic Church for his heresy regarding original sin. Yet the lifestyles of the two (or past lifestyles, in the case of Augustine) were an “ironic inverse,” Ed Simon writes in his article “Why Sin is Good.” Moreover, at first glance, reformed Augustine and ascetic Pelagius seem to resemble the same ideologies they preached. Yet the most striking difference was who brought about salvation: for Augustine, it is God–only the power of God could have brought about his reform–but for Pelagius, it is the efforts of the individual that determine salvation, not the mercy of God.

But this isn’t an article about a fifth-century argument. Instead, Ed Simon translates the debate into 21st-century terms:

In modern parlance, liberals assume that everyone is good and rational but just hasn’t read the right Mother Jones article or heard the right NPR broadcast yet. Conservatives adopt a more pessimistic attitude, however, for they assume everyone to be bad –everyone but themselves. Indeed for as much as the exuberant fundamentalist likes to blame the liberal relativist or the New Age pluralist for the abolition of belief in sin, it is the reactionary himself who is arguably most responsible for incubating our new world, where the charge to responsibility is treated as anathema. I have in mind the anarcho-capitalist, the libertarian, those who idolize the myth of the “self-made man” when the only Man who can make Himself is not of this world. These ethical pip-squeaks have erroneously imagined that anyone can pull himself up by his bootstraps, or by his jackboots as the case increasingly seems to be. Let us not pretend that there is anything “Christian”in a worldview that lets children without insurance die or that is fine with men and women starving to death in the richest nation in history.

St. Augustine by Carlo Crivelli (c. 1435-c. 1495)

Simon doesn’t say that one side represents Pelagius and the other Augustine; it is far more complex than that. Instead, he says, “belief in original sin keeps one honest, because you know you at least share a propensity to error with everyone, no matter how low.” When a person believes that it is through one’s own volition that one can achieve salvation, or become a “self-made man,” to use contemporary terms, that sort of ideology breeds arrogance and resentment. After all, what need is there for humility in a faultless human being? For Simon, “I’d rather have someone with an awareness of his own inborn shortcomings occupying the highest position of power than someone who believes he never makes mistakes.” Yet we’re all guilty of Pelagianism, so much that it is “unofficially the central heresy of our modern age.” (Even Pelagius’s own teaching that “it is possible to do anything which one really wants to do” recalls many a Facebook post.)

So what use does original sin have today, after so many ideologically utopian children of the Enlightenment have rejected Augustine in favor of the perfectibility of society and man through reason, whether through socialism or libertarianism or fascism? What use do we have for the arguments between Augustine and Pelagius? … For them, the universe contracted in on itself, Pelagius’ Britain separated from Europe. To make the parallels any more obvious would be heavy-handed (and we mustn’t be that). … To be heavy-handed may not be a sin, but what is, is the absurd avarice which leads to the denial of evidence that an Antarctic ice shelf bigger than Rhode Island is about to break off into the ocean due to human-generated climate change, even as the former CEO of Exxon and the current Secretary of State, as well as his boss, the leader of the “free” world, both deny that global warming is real. Sinful is that the eight richest men in the world have a combined wealth equal to the bottom half of the entire planet. Sinful is that black mothers and fathers have to wonder if their children will be murdered, and the knowledge that the perpetrators of those murders will often not be brought to justice. Sinful is that for a shamefully large percentage of the Republic the assertion that Black Lives Matter is somehow debatable.

And so on. The problem remains, however, that people simply don’t like to be accused of sin. This fact doesn’t make the realities of the world any less true, Simon retorts. The solution, he says, is “left Augustinianism,” an ideology that addresses the “consumption beyond reason” and the immense immorality that “can influence politics.” It means an acknowledgement of sin, of avarice, of selfishness, even in a secular world, not only in the world but in ourselves. After all, “sin”–or evil, if that word strikes you better–“like life, is not our fault –but it is our responsibility.”

]]>http://blogs.bu.edu/core/2017/03/20/left-augustinianism-original-sin-for-a-secular-age/feed/0From The New York Times: Books Can Take You Places…http://blogs.bu.edu/core/2017/03/19/from-the-new-york-times-books-can-take-you-places/
http://blogs.bu.edu/core/2017/03/19/from-the-new-york-times-books-can-take-you-places/#respondMon, 20 Mar 2017 02:59:28 +0000http://blogs.bu.edu/core/?p=5427“Donald Trump doesn’t want you to go,” the title goes on, reminding us that it is actually not going where he wants some to go that is the real problem for those people. Hisham Matar at the New York Times shares an imaginative column with us in which he describes reading as getting to know others by knowing oneself. It’s an old maxim, often having to do with truth: “be true to yourself and you’ll be true to others,” found in Shakespeare, Virginia Woolf, and Matar:

Antoine Maillard

All great art allows us this: a glimpse across the limits of our self. These occurrences arent merely amusing or disorientating or interesting experiments in virtual reality. They are moments of genuine expansion. They are at the heart of our humanity. Our future depends on them. We couldnt have gotten here without them.

Every weekday, get thought-provoking commentary from Op-Ed columnists, the Times editorial board and contributing writers from around the world.

Just as a river leads to the sea and from Jane Austens vernacular social order to William Faulkners American South, from Naguib Mahfouzs Cairo to Tayeb Salihs village in Sudan the particular in great literature has always flowed to the universal.

That is perhaps what the author of the iconic novel The House of Hunger, the Zimbabwean writer Dambudzo Marechera, meant when he said, If you are a writer for a specific nation or a specific race, then he had no use for you. What he was resisting was narrow provincialism, the sort of identitarianism that has invaded our academies and public discourse, and which sees individual life as, first and foremost, representative of a racial, religious or cultural category.

In his review, Matar, at one with himself, manages to reach us also by expressing atruth about literature and politics that is urgently in need of recognition: diversity is about unity and not division.

]]>http://blogs.bu.edu/core/2017/03/19/from-the-new-york-times-books-can-take-you-places/feed/0From The New York Times: ‘How Propaganda Works’ Is a Timely Reminderhttp://blogs.bu.edu/core/2017/03/12/from-the-new-york-times-how-propaganda-works-is-a-timely-reminder/
http://blogs.bu.edu/core/2017/03/12/from-the-new-york-times-how-propaganda-works-is-a-timely-reminder/#respondMon, 13 Mar 2017 03:52:20 +0000http://blogs.bu.edu/core/?p=5393Michiko Kakutani reviews a book that is timely because it comes likes an alarm clock, How Propaganda Works, by Professor Jason Stanley. It is not boring, so promise you will not be needing to hit the snooze button; but, in fact, the book will keep you engaged while serving as a prophylaxis against the opposing problem, zealously rallying behind the slogans of a demagogue. Donald Trump’s propaganda campaign evidently began (with a name like that) from the day he was born.

James Nieves/The New York Times.

Mr. Stanley begins by offering a definition of propaganda that extends beyond dictionary descriptions of biased or misleading information used to promote a particular political cause or point of view. Propaganda is characteristically part of the mechanism, he writes, by which people become deceived about how best to realize their goals, and hence deceived from seeing what is in their own best interests. This is achieved by various time-tested means by appealing to the emotions in such a way that rational debate is sidelined or short-circuited; by promoting an insider/outsider dynamic that pollutes the broader conversation with negative stereotypes of out-of-favor groups; and by eroding community standards of reasonableness that depend on norms of mutual respect and mutual accountability.

This might illumine both the successes and failures of the Sanders campaign, puzzling because it appealed to many of the same grievances that propelled Trump to the Oval Office, while providing solutions that would have actually helped to alleviate them.’Feel the Bern’ might have been clever, but what herd of sheep might that help to mobilize (which aren’t already) other than stoners? ‘Make America Great Again’, as propaganda, is more effective, which goes to show that propaganda doesn’t have to be clever. In fact, it should never be too clever since then the sheep might get suspicious. It should sound not like a baby’s first word, but first complaint. And it should say succinctly what people already feel an inkling of. If there was a God it would be a nice sort of surprise to think he looked like me.

]]>http://blogs.bu.edu/core/2017/03/12/from-the-new-york-times-how-propaganda-works-is-a-timely-reminder/feed/0From The TLS: Women Swoonedhttp://blogs.bu.edu/core/2017/03/12/from-the-tls-women-swooned/
http://blogs.bu.edu/core/2017/03/12/from-the-tls-women-swooned/#respondSun, 12 Mar 2017 05:32:27 +0000http://blogs.bu.edu/core/?p=5386“Anxiousness reminds us of existence; happiness momentarily forgets it existed.” The power of ‘it’ in that wonderful bit of existentialism comes in the ambiguity of its reference, and so reminding us of the closeness between ‘anxiety’ and ‘existence’, almost anagrams. One of the appeals of the existentialists, then, comes in their trying to work out the tension between these two; a tension which, unsolved, pulses with an anxiety of its own. Professor Shahidha Bari, writing for the TLS, recites some of the questions raised during a panel at the London School of Economics to open discussion about the ways in which these thinkers are not only relevant but needed. Serious problems sometimes ask for solutions that give us not only gravity but levity:

Its true that existentialism isn’t always easy, but it helps that many of the existentialists themselves were irresistible. As a young man, Sartre hurled water bombs from classroom windows, yelling Thus pissed Zarathustra! Simone de Beauvoir improvised elegant solutions to the straitened circumstances of life in Nazi-occupied Paris, wearing turbans when she could not secure a haircut, and sleeping in ski-wear to save on heating. Albert Camus, who was investigated by the FBI at the request of J. Edgar Hoover (the file was mislabelled Canus), could sit in the street in the snow, lamenting his love life, until two in the morning. He adored his cat, a creature blessed with the perfect moniker: Cigarette. Tell me whats not to love about these existentialists.

Professor Bari goes on to list many of the virtues of the philosophy and its thinkers. Besides charming anecdotes about Sartre’s scatological therapy for eschatological problems, Bari writes about the contentious friendship he shared with Camus, which persisted even when the latter ceased to exist.

http://blogs.bu.edu/core/2017/03/12/from-the-tls-women-swooned/feed/0From Literary Review: Righteous Reformationshttp://blogs.bu.edu/core/2017/02/26/from-literary-review-righteous-reformations/
http://blogs.bu.edu/core/2017/02/26/from-literary-review-righteous-reformations/#respondMon, 27 Feb 2017 02:39:41 +0000http://blogs.bu.edu/core/?p=5359Eric Ormsby at Literary Reviewengages in his latest review with Christopher de Bellaigue’sThe Islamic Enlightenment. The relationship between the two has not been easy, but that it has been unrequited for either is a misimpression that has gained popularity in some circles, namely populist ones. That is too bad, because de Bellaigue argues that the Sunny side of the Islam has been getting brighter for the last two centuries (Shi’a right… Ormsby thinks):

De Bellaigues title turns on a paradox. We seldom, if ever, think of Islam, at least in its current form, as exemplifying, let alone promoting, enlightenment. Yet his intention is to demonstrate that non-Muslims and even some Muslims who urge an Enlightenment on Islam are opening the door on a horse that bolted long ago. He goes even further when he states that for the past two centuries Islam has been going through a pained yet exhilarating transformation a Reformation, an Enlightenment and an Industrial Revolution all at once. This seems to me somewhat overstated.

Through the course of this absorbing review Mr. Ormsbymanages to insert his opinions while also interesting the reader about what the book has to say. A question that proved especially difficult for the Muslim intellectual of the nineteenth century was that of the seeming inequity of divine dispensation: why do the spiritually awry get more of the share than Muslims? A question that provoked the Christians too centuries before, and still does today even if in a different from. If after this stage of puberty Islam will settle into the moderate mildness like Christianity before it, then there is certainly a Sunny side at least in the future.

]]>http://blogs.bu.edu/core/2017/02/26/from-literary-review-righteous-reformations/feed/0Christopher Marlowe and the Mythology of Shakespearehttp://blogs.bu.edu/core/2017/02/23/christopher-marlowe-and-the-mythology-of-shakespeare/
http://blogs.bu.edu/core/2017/02/23/christopher-marlowe-and-the-mythology-of-shakespeare/#respondThu, 23 Feb 2017 15:56:39 +0000http://blogs.bu.edu/core/?p=5342Gary Taylor, lead general editor of The New Oxford Shakespeare, departs from the usual collections of Shakespeare’s plays. For the first time, the three Henry VI plays add the name of Elizabethan tragedian and “bad boy of the English Renaissance,” Christopher Marlowe, as co-author alongside the Bard. But that’s not all–fourteen other plays from the 37-work canon feature other co-authors, including but not limited to Thomas Nashe, George Peele, John Fletcher, and several others.

Do additional authors make Shakespeare’s plays any less, well, Shakespeare? For many years now, various theories have cropped up regarding the playwright, including the Victorian era conspiracy that Shakespeare was more or less the pseudonym or public persona for an aristocrat, as New Yorker writer Daniel Pollack-Pelzner points out. Nowadays it is understood that a final screenplay, even from the sixteenth century, is the work of “many hands”–indeed, “individual hands” that the New Oxford Shakespeare has been able to identify. Another theory claims that Shakespeare’s authority in Western literature stems from the mythology of the playwright rather than his skill, and that plenty of Renaissance writers existed who were just as good, if not better. But these aren’t new ideas, Pollack-Pelzner tells us. Instead, the most interesting point that the New Oxford Shakespeare brings to the table is that:

[T]he canonization of Shakespeare has made his way of telling stories–especially his monarch-centered view of history–seem like the norm to us, when there are other ways of telling stories, and other ways of staging history, that other playwrights did better. If Shakespeare worshipers have told one story in order to discredit his contemporary rivals, the New Oxford is telling a story that aims to give the credit back.

The New Oxford Shakespeare hopes to challenge the assertion that Shakespeare is a flawless playwright. This belief is the same that prevents many of us from accepting that there may have been others at work alongside the Bard as he penned works that would be studied and performed for generations to come.

Read more about Marlowe as co-author of Henry VI and the mythology of Shakespeare in The New Yorker.

]]>http://blogs.bu.edu/core/2017/02/23/christopher-marlowe-and-the-mythology-of-shakespeare/feed/0Seth Godin on “Soft” Skillshttp://blogs.bu.edu/core/2017/02/04/seth-godin-on-soft-skills/
http://blogs.bu.edu/core/2017/02/04/seth-godin-on-soft-skills/#respondSat, 04 Feb 2017 16:30:52 +0000http://blogs.bu.edu/core/?p=5292Let’s get things straight: they’re not soft skills. They’re anything but. So claims best-selling author Seth Godin, who abhors the reliance on a linear scale that companies tend to adopt as they consider new and current employees.

“For what is the self-complacent man but a slave to his own self-praise.” – St. Augustine, City of God(in). Image via dillythebun on Instagram.

It’s easy to measure based on a linear scale, Godin says, but the problem is that the scale only extends as far as what he calls “vocational skills.” These are textbook skills–the terms and definitions and strategies one would find on an exam. There is nothing wrong with vocational skills, of course; after all, a coder who cannot properly code is going to struggle if a company hires them for a position in that area. But those unquantifiable skills–“soft skills,” as they are often known–are not getting sufficient recognition in business and organizations. Charisma, diligence, contribution, and communication abilities all fall under this category. Things like critical thinking that a person learns away from the textbook.

Godin’s solution?

So lets uncomfortably call them real skills instead.

Real because they work, because they’re at the heart of what we need to today.

Real because even if you’ve got the vocational skills, you’re no help to us without these human skills, the things that we cant write down, or program a computer to do.

Real skills cant replace vocational skills, of course not. What they can do is amplify the things you’ve already been measuring.

The author doesn’t stop there. He creates five categories, providing an exhaustive list of skills pertaining to each, which then dissolves into a plug for his 4-week intensive workshop. Still, although Godin focuses on its application to the workforce, this list is useful in our own self-improvement. What do we value in ourselves, for example–our vocational skills or our soft/real skills? Do we place enough importance in both areas of our lives?

]]>http://blogs.bu.edu/core/2017/02/04/seth-godin-on-soft-skills/feed/0From 3QuarksDaily: ‘Alternative Facts’ And The Necessity of Liberal Educationhttp://blogs.bu.edu/core/2017/02/01/from-3quarksdaily-alternative-facts-and-the-necessity-of-liberal-education/
http://blogs.bu.edu/core/2017/02/01/from-3quarksdaily-alternative-facts-and-the-necessity-of-liberal-education/#respondThu, 02 Feb 2017 00:22:47 +0000http://blogs.bu.edu/core/?p=5280Scott Aikin and Robert Talisse at the 3quarksdaily find occasion in the recent intense disagreement over the crowd size attending the Trump inauguration to proffer the values of a liberal education. We understand this is a convenient pretext, because anything in the news would have allowed them to do just the same, and almost everything in the news is related to Trump. That is to say that both Trump and the news suffer from a lack of education, which is not news. What is valuable about this piece, though the object is trite, is in its taking a particular example of the latest Trump absurdity, and showing very astutely that the histrionics could have been avoided if only the dramatists were a little smarter.

Photograph for 3quarksdaily

In the coming months and years, we as a democratic citizenry will need to develop the skills necessary for avoiding and diagnosing such failures of discourse. We need to reacquaint ourselves with concepts like reason, evidence, justification, argument, and objection. We need also to cultivate skills of reading and listening closely, not with suspicion, but with a critical eye and ear. And these skills enable creative and clear thinking, too.

It’s for this reason we think that the humanities and liberal arts are good for democratic citizens. Reading, thinking, and writing about literature and ideas sound to too many like only so much indulgent bullshit, but it’s not. At least when it’s done well.

And it is certainly done well here at the Core Curriculum, and in this liberal corner generally. The average undergraduate at Boston University studying in the humanities has received the kind of rigorous training in critical thinkingthat Kellyanne Conway, a J.D. with honors from Georgetown University Law School, clearly has not. If she did, then she’d understand that one cannot implicate wholesale any one group of people–Muslim, Mexican, Women, African-Americans–unlessthose people are white,of course, which is neither racist nor hypocritical. But that realization demands some critical thinking, an ability we can all gladly boast. If you’d like to learn how to be smart